5. Maurice
de Vlaminck, Tugboat on the Seine, Chatou, 1906, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John
Hay Whitney 1998.74.4

6. Georges
Braque, The Port of La Ciotat, 1907, National Gallery
of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney
1998.74.6

These
were paintings on the edge of abstraction. They negotiated new, unstable
territorywere they essentially flat, patterned surfaces or a "window"
onto the world? Fauve pictures stand at the border between pictorial illusion
and the kind of "pure paint" that would become a preoccupation of twentieth-century
modernism. As Matisse later observed, "Fauve painting is not everything,
but it is the foundation of everything."